How would it be to find oneself reflected as “both handsome and unexceptional”, or find one’s back captured unawares from behind, “broad and fleshy, leathery with sun and age, and marked with numerous moles and scars”?
ONE POEM – Fran Root
Their guitars stand somewhere in an empty room on American soil
Dust spots in the sun settle on their strings
An interview with Claudia Knight
Born in the heart of the Black Country, Claudia Knight is predominantly a writer who is exploring the capabilities of her creativity after moving to London and discovering the freedom in taking more risks in life. Having discovered the endless possibilities when creating digital art, her bold yet simple pieces explore her relationship with herself, her body…
TWO POEMS – Paul McCarrick
The moon will not go down again,
street lights will be on forever and drive
electricity bills into walls with no seatbelts
ONE POEM – Anna Nightingale
when a father is a control bar
made of wood
and the strings snap
the puppets fall
ONE POEM – Lizz K
Photo by Joseph Pearson on Unsplash Milk Crate Malady We stumble to your home, arms linked tripping over ourselves as we talk I’m guided through the front door and down the passage to your room A lone mattress on the hardwood floor A vinyl collection spilling out of green milk crates Quick thumbs roll a cigarette we take…
Killer (non)fictions: Is true crime miscommunicating truths in favour of entertaining audiences? – C.S. Barnes
C.S. Barnes is a Worcester-based author and academic. She lectures in Creative Writing and English literature at various universities around the West Midlands, and her research background lies in representations of women in crime fiction. She also writes fiction and her work is published by Bloodhound Books. . True crime, by its very titling, leads…
TWO POEMS – Sara Nesbitt Gibbons
Their heads out, curved eyes on us,
reciprocating the salty, convex cabin.
Look, there, beautiful wooden bowling balls, said my mum.
SHORT STORY – Tamara Lazaroff
My grandfather who was not gay was born in 1930 in Seville, Andalusia. He worked as an itinerant labourer for the señoritos, the rich landlords, tending their olive trees and their domesticated animals.
THREE POEMS – Satya Dash
There are days when my body is a forest of old pines ailing and wailing in unison
COMFORT FOODS // Dissecting the Heart of Mandu – J.A. Pak
Dissecting the Heart of Mandu The Chinese, Mongolians, Japanese, and now the Americans and Europeans are in my food, but are the Turkic nomads there as well? Intriguing and exciting. A mandu (만두) is a Korean dumpling. A savory dumpling with a filling of meat. It’s usually boiled but it can also be steamed, pan-fried,…
A Corpus Stylistics Study of the Biased Narrative Voice in Jane Eyre – Yifan Zhai
Yifan Zhai is a young critic from Beijing. She is currently pursuing an MA in English Literature in Beihang University, China. She used to be in an exchange program to the St.Mary’s University of Texas, USA, where she developed an interest in studying and criticizing literature. Her focus is reading the classics with new…
TWO POEMS – Nick Chlopicki
the future is ready for
our, now available,
technological improvement
SHORT STORY – Valentina Cano
He was a black hole in a suit. An abyss in a necktie. And he sat down next to her on the train.
ONE POEM – María Paula Currás
I’m a mess
A profaner of tombs
Devoted to graves
Except mine.
ONE POEM – Yessica Klein
we kiss good-bye;
I wait for the kettle to boil. I am
happily waiting.
TWO POEMS – Steve Denehan
Pieces of me are escaping
through the pores
in the skin
of this room
ONE POEM – Lizz K
I sleep on the left side of the bed
so you can be on the right
the soft drum of your snore
signaling peaceful dreams
making me smile
ONE POEM – Ada Pelonia
yesterday blew
like a wind
TWO POEMS – Rachel Tanner
tell me the main differences between salt and nothing.
i will tell you the similarities. i will tell you i need both.
ONE POEM – Amy Lafrankie
A scream is trapped under my third rib where they perch on
like a perilous branch. I daydream of
You: hands on my throat
me: telling you I love you
FLASH FICTION – Judy Darley
Erin hesitates, watching. The old woman is there again, sitting on the swingset overlooking the valley
ONE POEM – Freya Zhang
You know the opposite of moonlight is a nest woven by darkness,
and you know your heart is a place where people ache,
where people no longer feed their birds on fire.
ONE POEM – Nora Selmani
what it would be like to be a skeleton.
what would happen if each dermal layer melted into the air
& my red stop light flesh went with it
without so much as a snap, crackle or pop?
FLASH FICTION – J.A. Pak
love is not you but a driving beat disguised in fast-moving glamour
ONE POEM – Julien Chatel
You make a landscape with tiny things
Turn late-night buns into morning seas
TWO POEMS – Penney Knightly
we are wrestling for the same
hooks in time
we are bitter catches
broken holed and punchy
ART: THE INK SAID – Gabrielle Turner
My inkscapes explore the transition between boundaries and intimacy; what it means to yield and to resist; to begin and end.
TWO POEMS – Zlatitsa Markova
I fell in love with this city through your eyes
and from the back of taxi cabs.
TWO POEMS – Jack William Mulvaney
Sadly, saw one dead cat
Cut down on pavement side
A few in lament stood over
Its lifeless body, white
ONE POEM – Elizabeth Ruth Deyro
Cold waters caress my feet like lovers kept apart
by chance. Foam meets flesh. Flesh kisses sand deeply,
forming wet clay against my soles. I press harder—
ONE POEM – Michael Akuchie
i am a city mad with fear
with sunshine eating up bodies in the open air
TWO POEMS – Michelle Diaz
I want to scrape back the clouds
and bring morning to you on a tray,
allow you that extra hour.
SHORT STORY – Viv Mah
In the worst of Anna’s dreams, Eric is always at his best: more alert, more alive, and more charming than she can remember.
COMFORT FOODS // Pawpaw Meat – Miriam Gauntlett
I don’t look Chinese, I don’t speak the language besides a few words here and there, and I have never met any of my Chinese family besides my grandmother; put simply, I don’t have much Chinese cultural knowledge at all. And yet, my grandmother gave birth to my mother, and my mother gave birth to me.
TWO POEMS – Yuan Changming
I don’t remember how many years old
I am, but I do care about my birthday
ONE POEM – Debatri Das
Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash Debatri Das is a student studying English Literature in Kolkata, India. Her work has previously appeared in LangLit, Muse India and Esthesia Magazine. Her interests include feminism, gender constructions and how that operates within her immediate surrounding. Things they said to young girls i.…….Don’t say that you don’t like this ………Or you…
THREE POEMS – Carly Maria Hubbard
Carly Maria Hubbard earned her BA in Creative Writing from DePaul University. Her poetry has appeared in Crook & Folly, Pentimento, and Hooligan Magazine and her flash fiction in formercactus and Flash Fiction Magazine. She is an accidental one-time winner of the Uptown Poetry Slam and often suspects that the spirit of Lucille Clifton is trying to contact her. Currently, Carly is…
The Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius: A Hero over the Regal Complacency – Freya Zhang
Freya Zhang is a young critic from Shanghai. She is currently based in London, pursuing an MA in Comparative Literature in King’s College London. After being awarded a scholarship under the State Scholarship Fund organized by China Scholarship Council in 2017, she pursued her further study in University College Cork for a semester, where she…
ONE POEM – Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Photo by Tikkho Maciel on Unsplash Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a GREAT scholarship awardee, and has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), Across The Margin, In/Words Magazine and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journaland…
ONE POEM – Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon
Image: Pierre Bonnard – Young Woman Writing (1908) Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She writes short stories and poetry. She has been widely published in web magazines and print anthologies. She was Highly Commended in the Blue Nib Chapbook Competition [Spring 2018], won the Hedgehog Press Poetry Competition ‘Songs to Learn…
Whiplash: A Queer Theory Investigation Of Jazz Music – Rhi Storer
Rhi Storer is a politics graduate from the University of Birmingham, and an aspiring digital data journalist. Her academic interests include the intersection of cultural theory and data for a new radical journalism, musicology, and critical theory. She tweets @rhistorerwrites Outside of academia, she enjoys jazz, painting, poetry, and rock climbing. Don’t forget the…
COMFORT FOODS // Pasul – Nora Selmani
Hello and welcome to the first edition of Comfort Foods! In the academic arena, Food Studies is an incredibly rich interdisciplinary field which looks to delineate much of the things we’d like to discuss here – predominantly, the relationship between food and culture – while grounding food in its social, political and even scientific context….
